Bokelskere.no

They wandered the narrow beehive streets, listening to the muezzins' emotional cries, and drank bright green glasses of mint tea in the town square.

"What do you recommend today?"

"What do you mean 'recommend.' Cheese! Same as always. The best. Who's your girlfriend`"

"This is Madeleine."

"You like cheese, young lady? Here, taste. Take some home with you. And get rid of this guy. He's no good."

Yet another revelation about Leonard: he was friends with the old italian cheese maker on Federal Hill. Maybe that was where he'd been going when Madeleine used to see him waiting for the bus in the rain. To visit his friend Vittorio.

They started leaving the apartment. One day they drove to Federal Hill to have pizza. Afterward, Leonard insisted that they go into a cheese shop. It was dark inside, the shades drwan. The smell was a presence in the room. Behind the counter, an old white-haired man was busy doing something they couldn't see. "It's eight degrees out," Leonard whispered, "and this guy won't open the windows. That's because he's got a perfect bacterial mix in here and he doesn't want to let it out. I read a paper where these chemists from Cornell identified two hundred different strains of bacteria in a tub of rennet. It's an aerobic reaction, so whatever's in the air affects the flavor. Italians know all that instinctively. This guy doesn't even know what he knows."

"How about couscous?" Larry said. "Mitchell, have you ever had couscous?"

"No."

"Oh, you have got to have couscous."

Claire made a wry face. "Whenever somebody comes to Paris," she said, "they have to go to the Latin Quarter and have couscous. Couscous in the Latin Quarter is so encoded!"

"You want to go somewhere else?" Larry said. "No," Claire said. "Let's be unoriginal."

The Pleshette's refrigerator was the first place Maitchell had encountered gourmet ice cream. He still remembered the thrill of it: coming down to the kitchen one morning, the majestic Hudson visible in the window, and opening the freezer to see the small round tub of exotically named ice cream. Not a greedy half gallon, as they had at Mitchell's house in Michigan, not cheap ice milk, not vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry but a flavor he had never dreamed of before, with a name as lyrical as the Berryman poems he was reading for his American poetry class: rum raisin. Ice cream that was also a drink! In a precious pint-size container. Six of these lined up next to six bags of dark French roast Zabar's coffee. What was Zabar's? How did you get there? What was lox? Why was it orange? Did the Pleshettes really eat fish for breakfast? Who was Diaghilev? What was a gouache, a pentimento, a rugelach? Please tell me, Mitchell's face silently pleaded throughout his visits.

Madeleine [...] nibbling all the treats, the nice-smelling fruit candies, the meaty drumsticks, as well as more sophisticated offerings, the biscotti flavored with anise, the wrinkly truffles, the salty spoonfuls of olive tapenade. She'd never been so busy in her life.

She kept her glasses on, left her hair loose, and walked over to Leonrad's apartment on Planet Street. On the way, she stopped at a market to buy a hunk of cheese, some Stoned Wheat Thins, and a bottle of Valpolicella.

Madeleine had the book in her lap. With her right hand she was eating peanut butter straight from the jar. The spoon fit perfectly against the curve of her upper palate, allowing the peanut butter to dissolve creamily against her tongue.

"You don't? Never had a little slice of Wisconsin cheddar with your apple pie? I'm sorry to hear that."

[...]

Finally, the waitress came over. Madeleine ordered the cottage cheese plate and coffee. Leonard ordered apple pie and coffee. When the waitress left, he spun his stool rightward, so that their knees briefly touched.

"How very female of you," he said.

"Sorry?"

"Cottage cheese."

"I like cottage cheese."